Larry O'Brien, campaign architect to JFK, left long Springfield legacy

Fran Sypek, longtime friend, sportswriter for The Republican and amateur historian, once asked me why there wasn’t a statue of Larry O’Brien somewhere in Springfield.

I had no idea.

I also wasn’t taking notes during that conversation, but if memory serves, Fran was wondering how Richard Nixon, had he been elected president in 1960, would have handled the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened for 13 October days to start World War III?

As Fran pointed out, Larry O’Brien was the organizational brain behind the Kennedy campaign that elected a president of the United States.

Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, paid the campaign bills, and, if history books are correct, didn’t exactly lead the league in being a good guy. But, he was also no fool. He wanted the best for his son.

To borrow a phrase: The best and the brightest.

So he hired Larry O’Brien, the son of an Irish immigrant bartender from Mattoon Street in downtown Springfield.

O’Brien’s first task was to organize JFK’s 1952 underdog race against incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, then to ensure a landslide six years later in a re-election bid. Then, he was to build the infrastructure for a presidential run in 1960.

The day Joe Kennedy, former ambassador to England and then still called by many “The Ambassador,’’ met O’Brien in 1952; he gave him this advice: “Whenever you’re dealing with someone important to you, picture him sitting there in a suit of long red underwear.’’

O’Brien wrote in his memoir, “No Final Victories: A Life in Politics From John F. Kennedy to Watergate,’’ that he never forgot the advice nor failed to use it when meeting the important and self-important.
It would serve him well in a great American political life.

Larry O’Brien was 73 when he died in the fall of 1990.

In Theodore H. White’s book “The Making of the President 1960,’’ a ground-breaking book on political reporting, O’Brien is everywhere.

O’Brien had first helped the best man at his wedding, Foster Furcolo (later a Massachusetts governor), win a Springfield congressional seat in 1948.

By then, O’Brien had honed a political formula, one he wrote down and titled “The O’Brien Manual,’’ a 68-page handbook that stressed mobilization of women as volunteers, voter registration, telephone canvassing and pro-active press relations.
It was the late Springfield Congressman Eddie Boland who first introduced O’Brien to JFK in 1947. When the two men would meet in the White House, Boland, who grew up on Moreland Street, would quip: “It’s a long way from Mattoon Street, O’Brien.’’

O’Brien served as a special White House assistant to Kennedy. He was the Time magazine cover boy on Sept. 1, 1961. The headline read: “White House & Congress: Power, Patronage and Persuasion.”
He was in Dallas, four or five cars behind the president, on Nov. 22, 1963. He was also one of the three men who picked out Kennedy’s casket.

He would serve President Lyndon B. Johnson as a congressional liaison, instrumental in massaging landmark civil rights and Medicare bills through both houses of Congress. Johnson then appointed him to the then cabinet position of postmaster general in 1965.
When Johnson decided not to run for president in 1968, O’Brien joined Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign. When Bobby Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles, O’Brien came home to Springfield “with nothing to do and nothing I wanted to do.’’
But Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the Democratic nominee called and asked O’Brien to run his campaign. O’Brien almost navigated a Humphrey come-from-behind victory against Richard Nixon in 1968’s presidential race.

O’Brien, who as a boy in 1928 shook Al Smith’s hand, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1932, was twice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. George McGovern almost picked him as his running mate in 1972.Billionaire recluse Howard Hughes hired O’Brien’s business to lobby in Washington.
The kid, who wasn’t good enough to play on Springfield’s Depression-era Cathedral High School basketball team, would be named in 1975 the commissioner of the National Basketball Association. The NBA championship trophy is named in his honor. He was elected into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame the year after his death in 1991.

Watergate was just another chapter in O’Brien’s biography.

As Nixon’s 1972 re-election neared, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, believed O’Brien, then head of the Democratic National Committee, to be the Democrats’ most professional political operator – and arranged for three audits of his tax returns by the Internal Revenue Service to discredit him. Then they bugged O’Brien’s offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. When burglars returned on June 17, 1972 to replace the taping system, they were discovered by a night watchman and arrested, setting off a chain of investigations, Congressional hearings, indictments and trials that led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

O’Brien is a character in Thomas Mallon’s new novel, “Watergate.’’ Earlier this month, O’Brien was quoted in The New Yorker’s excerpt of Robert Caro’s fourth book on Lyndon Johnson, “The Passage of Power,” detailing his years as vice president and president and set to be published on May 1.

Soon, the 40th Watergate anniversary stories and books will arrive.

Like other histories, they will speculate and maybe even offer more information as to why Nixon was so obsessed with O’Brien.

Was it his connection to Howard Hughes? Nixon’s brother Donald had defaulted on a loan from Hughes in 1957.